Teens and porn: Changing children's perception of what is normal. Photo: Rodger Cummins

Before porn was available online, it was relatively difficult to access. Children may have found R-rated magazines or videos at home, but the internet changed the game. Now they have access to unlimited amounts of free porn in the privacy of their bedrooms and, even worse, they have it on their smartphones or iPads making porn accessible anywhere they like.

One teacher told me that kids look at porn during recess or even in class (with the sound turned down) and it's very difficult for teachers to prevent it.

Keeping teenagers away from internet porn is practically impossible; you might think your children don't, but in reality most do. For example in the United States, a group of researchers who wanted to locate non-porn-using teenagers had difficulties finding enough of them to act as a control group.

Last year, a report published in the Medical Journal of Australia demonstrated a strong link between internet exposure to sexually explicit material and earlier and more diverse sexual practices. Practices that can result in adverse sexual and mental health outcomes, according to Dr Rebecca Guy and co-authors, from the UNSW's Kirby Institute.

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The authors wrote: "Young people who reported having visited sexually explicit websites were more likely to have higher numbers of sexual partners, engage in a wider diversity of sexual practices and use alcohol or drugs in association with sexual encounters."

British sex educator Cindy Gallop is the CEO and founder of Make Love Not Porn, a website dedicated to correcting sexual misconceptions and providing an alternative to industrial-strength, hard-core porn. The videos on her site look less like porn and more like indie films.

Gallops campaign for "real-world sex" was initially launched through an entertaining speech she gave at a Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in 2009 in front of speakers, including Bill Gates.

Her website is for adults only, but like all porn sites, it is easy to click the "over-18- only" button and you are in. She believes it's much better for teenagers to see some something more realistic than porn.

Gallop worries that men, women and children are being given an unrealistic vision of what sex is about. She believes children today are watching incredibly graphic re-enactments of sex, often before they have had their first sexual experience. Boys and girls brought up on a diet of hard-core porn are going to have a pretty distorted attitude in terms of their own sexual boundaries and may feel the pressure to replicate what they see.

Industry insiders and outside observers agree porn is becoming more and more extreme.

"Sexually experienced adults may understand that porn is a fantasy, performed by professionals with unrealistic porn-star bodies but many teenagers don't know this."

Porn is designed to be nastier and more hard-core so that it can be distinguished from the music videos and sexy advertising of today's pop culture.

Anal sex has become a standard part of heterosexual porn, and it is usually performed as a brutal act without any lubrication or care. Another new trend in mainstream porn is for a scene to end with a man ejaculating on a woman's face. The disturbing fact is that it seems as if this is the norm and young girls believe this is what boys like.

Ending a sex scene without any thought for the woman's pleasure and satisfaction after the man has climaxed, showing her being left with semen in her eyes, should not be viewed as normal sex.

Boys should be told that slapping women during sex and calling them bitches or always expecting oral sex is not cool.

Sexually experienced adults may understand that porn is a fantasy, performed by professionals with unrealistic porn-star bodies but many teenagers don't know this.

For some girls, first-time sex can be a very unpleasant and disappointing experience.

They can also become anxious about the appearance of their genitals, which don't look at all like those of the women on screen.

Teenage girls get most of their sex education from magazines and online publications, but they also look at porn. They may check out sites to see what boys like and how they should look and perform to please them.

I believe that our high schools should be encouraged to introduce discussions about pornography in their sex education curriculum. It might upset some parents but they have to realise that in this day and age they don't have the skills to do it themselves.

To make this task easier, in the UK a resources website called Planet Porn has been created, for sex educators, teachers, parents, youth workers and teenagers. It is aimed at helping young people to develop critical thinking skills so they can tell the difference between sex on Planet Porn and sex on Planet Earth.